City of Los Angeles Mobility Element Update (LA2B)
The City of Los Angeles is in the process of creating a new Mobility Element, one of several required elements of the city's General Plan. The Mobility Element will serve as an official, comprehensive policy statement on transportation within the city's borders, replacing the old Transportation Element last adopted in 1999. It classifies streets according to their intended use and establishes standards and guidelines for how each type of street should look and function. The current planning effort is presented to the public under the name LA2B. LA2B is a project of the Los Angeles Departments of City Planning and Transportation that seeks to envision new ways of moving throughout the city. The departments' past public statements have expressed an intent to move beyond thinking of streets as mere travel corridors and to allow considerations relating to public space, neighborhood quality of life, and pedestrian and bicycle safety to receive greater emphasis in city policy. Bicycling in LA2B The city's project team has announced its intention for the Mobility Element to identify a series of layered networks of streets that contain enhancements for specific modes of travel. One such network is known as the "Bicycle-enhanced Network," a draft map of which was released in January 2013. A blog post announcing the draft map describes this network as a series of "comfortable, safe on-street bicycle facilities that will reach local and regional destinations for all types of bicyclists" and indicates that such facilities may include "buffered or protected bicycle facilities that could encourage Angelenos aged 8 to 80 to cycle to their destinations." The network appears to be a subset of the streets identified in the Backbone and Neighborhood Networks in the 2010 Bicycle Plan, with the idea being to prioritize enhancements for these particular corridors. The draft Bicycle-enhanced Network does not correspond precisely with the 2010 Bike Plan's Five-Year Implementation Strategy or with the Priority One streets proposed to receive bike lanes as part of the Backbone Network. The full map is available for download here . Opportunities for Further Public Participation It is integral you check out their Participate section for information about how and when to get involved. They dedicated the first 12 months of the project to visioning and outreach, listening to your ideas and comments through an online town hall, workshops, and activity kits. From these efforts, they have developed our draft goals and policies, which are now available for public review on the Documents page. Project Objectives The objectives of the current planning effort are as follows: 1. Develop a revised Mobility Element which will identify goals, objectives, policies, and programs that reflect the communities’ future mobility ideas and suggested strategies. 2. Identify a layered network of arterial streets that assist all types of mobility (especially trucks, cars, bicycles, and pedestrians) to get around. 3. Update our City’s Street Standards to reflect all transportation modes (trucks, cars, scooters, bicycles, and pedestrians). 4. Produce a Streetscape Manual that will provide new guidelines and standards that will identify streetscape elements and characteristics (curb extensions, crosswalks, landscaped medians, parkways, sidewalk widths, pedestrian lights) that are appropriate for each street standard. 5.Revise our City’s Performance and Measurement Tools for evaluating the quality of our streets and mitigating the impacts of future projects. 6. Develop an Implementation Strategy that identifies the capital and maintenance costs as well as potential funding sources for implementing new street improvements and maintaining our City’s streets and sidewalks in good condition.